system results in a lot of unwanted ugliness to the screen.

There are ways to work around that. Many commands support a --quiet switch, which is my preferred method because I usually want to see external command's output to be able to inspect it for problems, or you could use another module to capture the command's STDOUT to suppress it.

system returns a response code which I'm just going to throw away.

I don't understand this argument - you're throwing away the backtick's return value as well... Plus, why would you call a command and then ignore whether it was successful or not?

backticks are faster to type and less cluttering.

Backticks don't offer a way to avoid the shell.